The author of ‘Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right’ and Joe Miller discuss how media public policy has helped the Right seem bigger than they are.

Bio

Anne Nelson (@nelsona)
is the author of ‘Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the
Radical Right’ (Macmillan, 2019) and lecturer in the fields of international
affairs, media and human rights. As a journalist she covered the conflicts in
El Salvador and Guatemala, and won the Livingston Award for best international
reporting from the Philippines. She served as the director of the Committee to
Protect Journalists. In 1995 she became the director the international program
at the Columbia School of Journalism, where she created the first curriculum in
human rights reporting.

Since 2003 Nelson has been teaching at Columbia’s School of
International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where her classes and research explore
how digital media can support the underserved populations of the world through
public health, education and culture.

Nelson is a widely published author. Her 2009 book “Red
Orchestra” describes the way media was used for both propaganda and resistance
in Nazi Germany, and was published to wide acclaim in the U.S. and Germany. In
October 2017, Simon & Schuster published her book “Suzanne’s Children: A
Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris,” telling the story of a rescue network in Paris
that saved hundreds of Jewish children from deportation. The Wall
Street Journal praised the way the book “vividly dramatizes the stakes of acting
morally in a time of brutality.” It was named a finalist in the National
Jewish Book Awards. The work was published as “Codename: Suzette” in the
UK, and as “La Vie Heroique de Suzanne Spaak” by Robert Laffont in
France. It is available as an audiobook, read by Nelson, and was released
in paperback in October 2018.

Nelson’s play “The Guys,” based on her experiences following the
September 11th attacks, has been produced in all fifty states, fifteen
countries, and as a feature film. It has been widely used to fund local fire
departments and related causes such as trauma counseling and burn treatment
centers.

Nelson also has long experience in philanthropy. She has
consulted for the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Knight
Foundation, among others, in areas of human rights, freedom of expression,
social and economic development, and media policy.

Nelson is a graduate of Yale University, a 2005 Guggenheim
fellow, and a 2013 Bellagio Fellow. She is a fellow at the Arnold A. Saltzman
Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia, and a member of the New York
Institute for the Humanities and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Resources

News Roundup

Former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton and billionaire Democratic mega-donor George Soros
called out Facebook’s apparent intention to get President Trump re-elected. The
social media platform continues to maintain its policy of allowing ads placed
by politicians that contain falsehoods to remain on the platform. According to
Bloomberg, in a speech at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Mr. Soros stated “I
think there is a kind of informal mutual assistance operation or agreement developing
between Trump and Facebook”. He went on to say that Facebook and Trump will
work to protect each other.

At the Sundance
Film Festival and in an Atlantic interview, Ms. Clinton expressed similar
concerns and said that Zuckerberg’s philosophy of letting its users “decide
for themselves” what’s true or false is an authoritarian perspective.

According to
new reports in the Guardian, Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’s smart phone
was hacked in 2018. Forensic investigators reportedly found a “high probability”
that a malicious file that was embedded within a WhatsApp conversation between Mr.
Bezos and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, scoured Bezos’s phone for
personal information. The Hill notes that 9 months later, the National Enquirer
revealed details of Mr. Bezos’s extramarital affair, although both Saudi Arabia
and National Enquirer former parent company American Media Inc., both deny
Saudi Arabia’s involvement. 2018 was
also the year that Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered, a
murder the U.S. concluded was ordered by bin Salman—an allegation that bin
Salman and the Saudi government deny. President Trump has backed bin Salman and
the Saudi government’s denials of the murder.

In addition to controlling
Amazon, Mr. Bezos also owns Washington Post, so multiple lawmakers and cybersecurity experts believe
the alleged hack, reportedly conducted with tools linked to a bin Salman associate,
was designed to suppress
reporting on Mr. Khashoggi’s murder. On Wednesday, Bezos tweeted
a photo of himself standing with Mr. Khashoggi’s fiancé under the hashtag
#Jamal.

Hackers
gained access to several NFL teams’ social media profiles on Monday, including
those of the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs, who are set to
face off in Super Bowl 54 next Sunday. The hackers got into the teams Twitter
Facebook and Instagram accounts. The hackers removed profile pictures, bios and
headers. Other teams affected included the Dallas Cowboys, Philadelphia Eagles,
the Houston Texans, the New York Giants, the Chicago Bears, and the NFL’s
official Twitter account.

Rodney
Scott, the 27-year Customs and Border Patrol veteran whom President Trump
tapped to lead the agency, has reportedly been a member of the same Facebook
group that led to his predecessor’s firing.
The Facebook group “I’m 10-15”—10-15 is the code name CBP officers use
to communicate that they have a so-called alien in custody—has been the site of
racist and misogynistic attacks against Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
in addition to other racist and sexist posts. Former CBP Chief Carla Provost retired
after it was discovered that she was a member of the group.

Finally, the Washington Post reports that Georgetown University and the DC Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs are working on a new algorithm to go after slum lords in the District of Columbia. The Washington Post had reported back in 2017 that Sanford Capital, which owns several buildings in the District, maintained poor conditions including broken doors, rat infestations and problems with heat and sewage, even as they received millions in taxpayer subsidies. The new algorithm will be designed by Georgetown students and with the goal of improving efficiencies in an understaffed and unwieldy building inspection system.

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